In a cellular network, co-channel interference (CCI) because of frequency reuse is one of the factors that limit system capacity. Many measures to mitigate CCI have been studied and applied in cellular systems. For example, soft frequency reuse in power and frequency domains, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) in the time domain, and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission in the downlink and reception in the uplink have been specified in LTE releases.
With the evolution of 4G LTE systems, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission has been shown to be a pragmatic. In CoMP transmission, transmission parameters of multiple radio nodes are harmonized by a centralized controller such that the interference can be effectively avoided. However, CoMP schemes often require additional signaling overhead and computational power. With the current LTE network architecture, it may be costly to deploy some CoMP schemes. Additionally, the closed design of enhanced packet core (EPC) architecture may only allow vendor-specific CoMP schemes.